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A
Tragedy in Gujarat
by
: Mehru Jaffer
The tremors of the
killer earthquake in Gujarat are felt far and wide. All of us have
been shaken. Not just Indians but people from around the world
continue to contribute to lessen, even a little, the pain caused by
the tragedy. Even the fifty year old wall of futile fury between India
and Pakistan is waved aside in a rare moment of solidarity as
donations arrive from the otherwise hostile neighbour to areas still
buried under the debris of death and destruction. Andy Maleta from
Austria is not just an old friend of mine but of the country. He first
visited India in a pony's tail in his late teens and his ties with the
place and people have only strengthened over these last three decades.
Writing soon after the
worst earthquake in India in half a century, Andy said that he was
flying over Gujarat from Goa to Delhi when he thought of the tragedy
below and could not bear to drink the water offered to him on the
flight by the air hostess. What amazes him most is the fact that
thousands of people died not only of the natural disaster but of
concrete falling upon them from man made buildings constructed in a
haphazard way on the number one earthquake zone of India.
"When an entire
hospital collapses in 45 seconds burying everybody under its roof, it
is not to the gods that we point to but have to ask ourselves how is
it possible for something like this to happen with all our knowledge,
technology and understanding of reality?" wonders Andy who was
still in the process of savouring all that he had experienced at the
recently concluded Kumbh Mela on the banks of the holy river Ganges
where it meets with the Yamuna river when the tragedy in Gujarat shook
him out of his meditative mood.
Ramesh Kumar Biswas,
famed urban ecologist and editor of Metropolis Now, a recent
publication profiling 15 cities of the world emailed to say that the
newly erected buildings in Ahmedabad were not built to be earthquake
resistant. He found that some older structures in the old part of the
city with timber flooring and roofing were better built to absorb the
shocks of earthquake energy. Since the roof is not rigidly fixed it
does shake during an earthquake but does not topple down completely.
This is a principle
Ramesh points out that is used in the old Newari towns of the
Kathmandu valley and has now been adapted on a high-tech scale by the
Japanese to build skyscrapers in Shinjiku, Tokyo. What bothers Ramesh
most is that builders in India may emerge out of this great tragedy
without having learnt any lesson.
"Knowing our
countrymen they will not only not build better in the future but they
will leave all those buildings, including those affected in Delhi
which have been slightly damaged, unrepaired," he says expressing
fears that the same buildings might collapse one day without warning
causing further calamities.
Ramesh recalls
researching building types in Ahmedabad with students of the local
architecture faculty a few years ago for a project required by the
Austrian Science Foundation and his conclusion on the ethics of the
construction work had filled him with apprehension. But Indians, it
seems, hate to heed warnings, leaving much to the gods. Even before
this earthquake struck the public was told 30 days before the tragedy
that it was coming. But in the absence of any organised mass movement
to resist the killer wave most ignored the warning and continued with
business as usual. Besides what shelter could the people take if they
did decide to leave their homes?
In 1989 an equally
deadly earthquake at 7.2 on the Richter Scale struck California's Bay
that destroyed property worth millions of dollars, including a long
stretch of a double decker highway where the upper deck crumbled down
upon the lower one. This was the most destructive of earthquakes in
the area since the great San Francisco quake of 1906.
"But in California
in 1989, a broadly similar quake killed all of 63 people. Sixty
three," writes Dilip D'Souza from India. What bothers Krishna
Prasad yet another Indian columnist most is, "... neglect of and
nonchalance towards the most valuable commodity known to humankind.
Life."
It is respect for life
that got California to put into practice earthquake resistant building
codes, crisis relief systems, bringing deaths down from 2,000 in 1906
after the great quake and a major fire it set off throughout San
Francisco, to 63 in 1989. The death count in Gujarat continues into
hundreds of thousands of people.
At that time hospital
buildings in the California region sustained only minor system and
cosmetic damage and operational interruptions did not occur.
Contrasting this with Bhuj where hospitals themselves collapsed, Dilip
sighs sadly in his emotional column, "If we in India do have
requirements that whatever structures we erect must resist
earthquakes, Gujarat is proof that those requirements are either
flagrantly inadequate or flagrantly ignored."
Andy is full of
admiration for the spirit of individual human beings who prove so good
at crisis management, so different to times of political crisis that
Indians are inthe habit of often leaving unresolved. Dilip too lauds
the way every sickening barrier of caste, religion, class,
language is transcended. People from every corner work together,
selflessly, tirelessly to bring normalcy back. He recalls his
participation in the relief work in Orissa after the killer cyclone
there in 1999 as some of the most uplifting ones of his 41 years.
But the question
remains as to why it should take a tragedy of this proportion for
Indians to respect and love each other and to yearn for normal times
once again only to erect barriers, as if, of hate and prejudice once
the crisis is over?
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